The Lost Gate (25 page)

Without going back to the street, Danny gated through the other houses he and Eric had decided probably had good stuff in them. One of them was a complete bust—as far as he could tell, the owners had bought way more house than they could afford, so apart from the living and dining rooms, the rest of the house barely had furniture. But the other four houses yielded jewelry, wallets, credit cards, laptops, iPads and Kindles, even a couple of really expensive-looking vases, though for all Danny knew they were Wal-Mart copies.

If that wasn't enough to set Eric up for a while, then too bad. The small, easy pickings from half a dozen houses was all the burglary Danny intended to do. In his life.

Unless he actually
needed
to, for survival. For food. He wasn't going to rule anything out, but he certainly wasn't going to go into burglary as a career. It would be too pathetic, for the first surviving gatemage in who knew how many years to use his power to make a living by stealing stuff from drowthers.

Danny first gated to the place on Tilden Street, just to see if any alarms had gone off or any cops had shown up. Nobody. The street was absolutely quiet. In the morning there'd be a lot of consternation and complaining, but for tonight, everybody was going to get their sleep.

Danny went through the gate to the garden, where Eric was sitting surrounded by a stack of laptops and rows of other electronics. He was shivering a little. The two vases were lying in the grass. “I think those vases are either crap or brilliant,” said Eric.

“Or something in between,” said Danny. “But I'm betting on crap. Want to break them to keep warm?”

“No,” said Eric. “Because hey, here they are, what if they're worth something after all? You didn't do anything stupid like writing IOUs and signing your name, did you?”

“That's an excellent idea,” said Danny. He stepped back through the gate, waited for a count of five, and then returned to Eric. Now Eric was standing, and when he saw Danny he visibly sagged with relief. “What kind of moron are you?”

“The fun-loving kind,” said Danny. “I'm not an idiot, of course I didn't sign my name to IOUs.”

“Good.”

“I signed yours.”

“Yeah, right. So the way I see it, it'll take us a few trips to get this all into the store.”

“I, uh, spied on them a little bit this afternoon,” said Danny. “The clerk isn't going to let us in.”

“What kind of all-night corner store turns away customers?” said Eric.

“Customers carrying a bunch of laptops aren't the normal clientele.”

“So how do we get in there?”

“I'm thinking we start out by me pushing these all through a gate into Rico's office.”

“Rico? You're on a first-name basis with him now?”

“That's what the clerk called him.”

“When you were spying.”

“The clerk saw me. Just my face. He probably thinks he was hallucinating.”

“So maybe when we come in he'll run out screaming,” said Eric.

“No,” said Danny, “I don't think I should make this stuff magically appear. Last thing we want is for Rico to know how we do it.”

“So what? He can't catch you.”

“But he can catch
you,
” said Danny, “and hold you hostage to get me to burgle every house in Washington, and then probably kill you anyway when I'm done.”

“Oh,” said Eric. “Yeah, you're right, you shouldn't show them stuff popping out of thin air. Though I've got to tell you, there's no way you can know how cool it looks on the other end, when you hand the stuff through to me. Like the night air is giving birth to high-price electronics and jewelry and I'm the doctor there to catch them.”

Danny was still focused on the transportation problem. “What if I pop them into an aisle of the store, out of sight from the checkout desk?”

“Then we can show him where they are, and he won't have to know how we got them there,” said Eric. “That works.”

Danny made a minigate at floor level and slid the laptops through all at once. They were heavy when you stacked them up, but he did it smoothly and the stack didn't tip over. Then he made a series of other gates, sliding everything through in bunches until he imagined they were all lined up in the aisle.

Since they weren't hearing any tumult from the sidewalk in front of the store, there probably hadn't been a customer inside watching the stuff appear. Either that, or the poor sap fainted. Anyway, it was all inside except for the jewelry, which Eric had wrapped up in his shirt, which he was now carrying like a parcel.

“Cold now?” asked Danny.

“Jewelry makes me warm,” said Eric.

They walked around to the front of the store and came in the door.

The clerk saw them and got a weird look on his face. “Get lost,” he said softly. “You don't want to see him.”

“We need the money,” said Eric, “and he needs the stuff to sell.”

“You don't know him,” said the clerk softly. “He thinks you're small-time trash and he's going to send you to the hospital.”

Eric set the shirt-wrapped parcel on the counter and opened it.

“Holy shit,” said the clerk. He reached under the counter and apparently he pressed a button, because out came Rico from the back room, carrying the aluminum bat.

“I thought I told you little assholes what would happen if you came back,” said Rico.

“Maybe you oughta look at the stuff,” said clerk. “They're not a joke, Rico.”

Rico glared at Danny and Eric, then stepped between them and looked down at the shirt-load of jewelry on the counter. “Fakes,” he said.

“How odd that they'd keep their fakes in a safe,” said Danny.

“People do that,” said Rico. “I'll give you fifty bucks for it.”

Eric reached out and started refolding the shirt over the jewelry.

The bat came down lightly across his arms. The blow was only just hard enough to make Eric cry out and snatch his arms back. “A hundred bucks,” said Rico. “If you don't like that, then I pay nothing plus two broken heads.”

“So what you're saying,” said Danny, “is that you don't want to see the rest of the stuff.”

“That isn't all?” said the clerk, impressed.

“Shut up, José,” said Rico.

“Ah, José,” said Danny. “Nice to know your name.”

“What else do you have?” asked Rico.

“Nothing, for a fence who offers a hundred bucks for fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry.”

“Maybe five thousand street, not fifty, which means five hundred from me to you,” said Rico. “And yeah, okay, I low-balled you a little because I told you little assholes not to come back here and you came anyway.”

“We thought you were a serious businessman,” said Danny. “But now you've hurt my friend.”

“Let's just get out of here,” said Eric. He looked like he was about to cry. He was hugging his own arms like a girl who was afraid of getting hit in the chest with a baseball.

“I don't think so,” said Rico. “I think your friend is staying here while you bring in the rest of the stuff.”

“Oh, it's already in here,” said Danny. “We sort of pre-delivered.”

“Where?” demanded José. “I didn't see you guys bring anything in here but that stuff.”

“At the back of the store,” said Danny. “You were kind of napping.”

Rico glared at José.

“I was
not,
” said José. “I wasn't even reading or watching television, I was sitting here watching the damn door.”

“Come on back and see for yourself,” said Danny. He led the way down an aisle. When they rounded the corner, there were the laptops and the game consoles. Only now did Danny realize that some of the console cords and cables seemed to be cut—they disappeared in thin air. Apparently in the dark outside, Danny hadn't realized that some of the cords didn't make it all the way through the minigates. He reached down and pulled the offending consoles away from the gate and the cords slid fully into view.

“That's a lot of electronics,” said Rico.

“Good laptops,” said Danny. “Top of the line.”

“Bullshit,” said Rico. “They're all used. Most I can pay for any of them is a couple hundred. Maybe twenty-five bucks for each console.”

Eric grumbled at that. “You shittin' me, man? You can get a lot more than that.”

“Give him a break here,” said Danny. “He's got to make his profit and overhead. He's got to pay José's salary. And what if some of it doesn't find a buyer? We don't know what condition these things are in, they might not run at all.”

“Smart boy,” said Rico.

Eric didn't like it, but Danny held up a hand to silence him. “Come on, George, that's more than we were hoping for from our first haul. He likes our stuff, finds out he can sell it for a good price, he'll start raising our percentage.”

“You got that,” said Rico.

And Danny was pleased that Eric hadn't blinked when Danny called him George. No reason to give Rico their real names. Danny's didn't matter so much, but Eric could be hunted down if this guy didn't like how the deal worked out.

“Come on into my office and I'll give you the payout,” said Rico. “José, bring the parcel from the counter.”

“Right, boss,” said José, and he walked back down the aisle to the front.

“And lock the door!” Rico called after him. “Can't believe I let you show me this stuff with the door unlocked.”

Then he suddenly had Danny slammed up against the display shelves with his shirt up around his ears, and he was frisking him. “Can't have a wire in here,” he said. “Can't have you entrapping me into a crime I would never have committed otherwise.”

“We got no wires,” said Eric. “Get your hands off the kid, you perv.”

“It's okay, George,” said Danny. “He's got to be sure we're not plants.” Then Danny laughed at his own words, conjuring up an image of him and Eric sprouting out of the ground, with Stone sprinkling them from a watering can.

“Something funny?” asked Rico.

“Tickles,” said Danny.

“Yeah, well, you're clean enough. You, George, drop trou or I'll feel you up and maybe I'll accidentally hurt your nads for calling me a perv.”

Eric dropped his pants and showed that he didn't have a wire concealed either. “First time anybody ever
asked
me to moon them,” he said.

“Pull 'em up, smartass,” said Rico. “All right, come on into the office.”

Danny went through the door first and headed for the desk. Eric was right behind him, but then he heard a cry of pain and a thud and he whirled around to see Eric sprawled on the floor, writhing in agony, and Rico just unwinding from a massive swing of the bat.

“You little assholes, didn't I tell you what would happen if you came back here?” said Rico, softly but harshly. “Didn't I give you fair warning?”

José was in the doorway now, holding Eric's shirt with the jewelry inside. “Ay Dios,” he said. “Santa Trinidad.”

Danny now had Rico's desk between him and the baseball bat.

“Hold still and take your medicine,” said Rico. “Or I'll just keep smacking your buddy's head till it pops like a melon.”

“You don't want no bloodstains on the floor,” said José.

“Don't start thinking you know what I want and don't want,” said Rico menacingly. Then he lunged forward, swinging the bat as he came. It would have caught Danny at chest level, except that he gated his way back outside.

Man, it was cold out there. He only stayed a couple of seconds before he gated back into the office, but this time right next to Eric. His plan was to get him up and make a run for it, but Eric cried out in pain when Danny tried to pull him.

Rico was off-balance, recovering from his wild swing. He whirled around, looking baffled for a moment as he staggered and leaned on the desk. José, for his part, had a sick look on his face. He, at least, seemed to know what he had just seen—Danny disappearing in one place and reappearing a moment later in another.

“Quick little bastard, aren't you?” said Rico. “Run all you want, I'll just take it out on your friend. He ain't getting up, not without a stretcher. I cracked half his ribs, if I didn't break his back.” And now the bat was high over Rico's shoulder as he readied the bat to come down on Danny's head.

What choice did Danny have? He got a firm grip on Eric's wrist and then pulled with all his might to drag him through the gate he had just created. He knew as he did it that it couldn't work—even though Danny was through the gate himself almost instantly, it would take time to drag Eric's body through, and who knew what Rico might do—beat him more, or just grab onto his leg and pull back, stronger.

So Danny reflexively did something he didn't know he could do. He moved the gate. Slid the mouth of it right over Eric's limp body.

It worked. Eric was lying in the garden, still unable to get up—but out of Rico's office.

Only Rico was holding onto Eric's leg. Just the man's heavy arms coming through the gate. Maybe Rico could have come through all the rest of the way, if Danny hadn't let go of Eric. Without that connection with Danny, Rico seemed to be unable to pull his arms back or push them farther through. He was stuck.

Danny didn't dare grab Rico's arms or do anything to him at all—if he touched him, Rico might come the rest of the way through or drag Danny back.

So instead, Danny created a new gate into the office.

There was Rico, looking terrified, with his arms reaching down toward the floor but disappearing just below the elbows. “Let go of me, you little shit!” he shouted when he saw Danny.

“I'm not holding you,” said Danny.

José was sitting in the doorway, his back against the frame, looking at Danny wide-eyed. “I did see you on the wall,” he said. “I'm not crazy, I saw you.”